Hi. Sorry if this has been covered elsewhere - I did a quick search for it, but I didn’t find anything that matches.
I’m a bit of a n00b still, particularly with openSUSE - I’m trying it for the first time after using the 'buntus for a few years. I read in a few places that SUSE is the best distro for the XFCE desktop, and since unity sucks and I like XFCE I figured I had no reason not to try it!
Anyway, I’m trying to get openSUSE with XFCE working on a bit of an older system. Can’t tell you the exact specs off the top of my head, but it’s about 6 years old, 3 point something mhz single core celeron, 1 gig of ram, 300 gig hard drive. I tried the normal intallation DVD, but every time I did it crashed. I got the first screen where I could pick language etc, it loaded a bunch of stuff then crashed. And it’s not the DVD because it worked fine on a different newer machine. So I figured I just didn’t have enough RAM or something else for the DVD version and so tried the live CD.
This one gets a bit further, but ends up dumping me on a blue screen with a mouse cursor and nothing else. The same happens on the other machine as well. All I can do in this screen is right click to bring up a menu with a bunch of items, most of which do nothing and with slightly cryptic descriptions. The only one that does something is “exit” (or was it “quit”?) which brings me to a login screen. Logging in as root brings me right back to the blue screen with cursor.
Can someone explain to me what’s going on? Is there a way I can get openSUSE to install on my older machine?
Cheers!
Haha! Of course I mean the computer has a 3 point something gigaherz processor, not megaherz. I’m not trying to install on a Super Nintendo! (Although if anyone knows how I can do that, let me know! ;))
I have 12.1 on an older system (earlier than 2000), with only 786M of RAM.
I did find that I had to select the text mode install to get it to work (using the DVD image installed on a USB, and using PLOP boot manager to boot from the USB, because the BIOS is too old to support that). The need for text mode is probably a failure to recognize my monitor, rather than a RAM shortage problem. Once installed, it worked fine (I installed KDE and XFCE).
I suggest you try text mode and see if that gets you further.
Okay, thanks for the tip!
I’ll give it a whirl and see how it works. As I said though, I’m still quite a beginner with linux, so don’t be surprised if I post back asking how it’s done!
Wow, it worked like a charm!
I got a bit scared when I read “text mode” - I kinda expected to have to do via command line or something. Luckily not, and I’ve got SUSE and xfce working perfectly!
Great. I’m glad you have it working.
You might want to try Xfce 4.10;)
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/other-forums/news-announcements/tech-news/474875-xfce-4-10-release.html